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his position. It was a bad gamble; Novotny continued to lose support at all levels of the party. The final blow came in early December when Soviet party chief Leonid Brezhnev arrived in Prague for an on-the-spot assessment of the situation and decided not to intervene in Novotny's behalf. Desperate, Novotny and his principal supporters then toyed with the idea of mounting a military coup, but they proved unable to bring one off. In early January 1968 the Central Committee ousted Novotny as Party First Secretary and elected Alexander Dubcek to take his place. Novotny was, however, allowed to retain both the Presidency and his seats on the Party Presidium and Central Committee until March when, partly because of the damaging revelations of a close associate who had defected to the West, his political career came to an abrupt end.
The news of Novotny's fall was received with approval at home and abroad. A brighter era seemed to be in store for the Czechoslovak people, but no one, least of all the Soviets, really expected momentous changes. Dubcek, a compromise choice for the top party post, had been trained in Moscow and had seemed to occupy a middle-of-the-road position on political and economic reform during his rise to leadership of the Slovak Party organization under Novotny. Once in national office, however, he surrounded himself with an impressive team of liberal intellectuals and youthful technocrats whose unorthodox views and impatient energy soon won popular approbation.
Czechoslovakia's brief and exhilarating Prague Spring blossomed in April when the Dubcek regime adopted, and swiftly moved to implement, a comprehensive program for reform—the so-called Action Program. The sweeping changes embodied therein were intended both to rationalize the country's unwieldy socialist system and to humanize it by making it responsive to democratic processes. Thus, personal rights and liberties were guaranteed, including the freedoms of speech and assembly and the right to travel, work, and, in some cases, reside permanently abroad. Censorship was lifted. The role of the party in the process of government was reduced, and the National Assembly was directed to assume its constitutional role as the "supreme organ of state power." Plans were made to establish a decentralized and market-oriented economy, akin in spirit if not in detail to the Yugoslav model. Gustav Husak was called out of political obscurity to lead a drive to federalize the state. And while the Dubcek regime repeatedly reaffirmed its basic loyalty to Moscow, it delighted its prideful domestic constituency by simultaneously serving notice that Czechoslovakia would thenceforth maintain a less subservient stance.
The tasks Dubcek set for himself in the Action Program were not easy. From the outset, the reform process was impeded by quarrels over tactics and priorities and by the maneuvers of formidable opponents both at home and abroad. For their part, Czechoslovak conservatives, both inside and outside the party, opposed Dubcek's programs for ideological reasons and out of fear that they would lose their jobs. Beyond the country's borders, the Soviet Union and its more conservative Warsaw Pact allies, most notably East Germany and Poland, became concerned that Dubcek's reforms not only might lead Czechoslovakia to withdraw from the socialist camp but also might prove to be disastrously contagious. In consequence, the pressures brought to bear on Dubcek from the east to get him to alter his course mounted steadily throughout the spring and summer of 1968, culminating in a summit-level confrontation between the Soviet Politburo and the Czechoslovak Presidium at the Slovak border town of Cierna nad Tisou in late July.
The Soviet-orchestrated campaign of intimidation was, however, a dismal failure. Far from cowing the Czechoslovak people and their leaders, it forged a strong bond of anti-Soviet nationalism between them. Increasing domestic popularity, in turn, encouraged Dubcek and its lieutenants to deal with their Warsaw Pact critics in the best and most devious Schweikist tradition. Finally, when it appeared that the pledges the Soviets thought they had extracted from Dubcek at Cierna nad Tisou would not be fulfilled, the Kremlin's patience ran out. On the night of 20-21 August, Moscow moved to crush the Dubcek experiment by force. About 300,000 troops, predominantly from the Soviet Union but including contingents from East Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary, poured into Czechoslovakia. The invasion was swift and well coordinated. There was no organized military resistance and, despite sporadic gunfire and attempts by some Czechoslovak citizens to sabotage the movements of the invading forces, casualties were extremely light. Prague and other major urban centers were quickly occupied. Key Czechoslovak leaders, including Dubcek, were arrested and spirited away to prison cells in the U.S.S.R.
At this point, however, the Soviet Union's carefully laid plans went awry. Failing to foresee the surge of national unity and loyalty to Dubcek that its heavy-handed actions would provide, the Kremlin had assumed that it could install a collaborationist regime within hours after the intervention. The Soviets quickly learned how wrong they were. Gen. Ludvik Svoboda, the normally mild-mannered old national hero who had succeeded Novotny as President 5
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